The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (20 page)

There was scarcely a time, gazing out on that expanse (too sluggish and muddy to qualify as majestic but still a serious waterway), that the freighters and tankers lumbering upstream didn’t vanish before my sight and a single tiny vessel float into view: that Dutch galleon tacking against the wind, heading for Jamestown with its chained black cargo. In a classroom moment I would never forget I listened to Miss Thomas, our distant and opaque sixth-grade teacher, blurt out part of a history text
(In 1619, known as the Red Letter Year at the new English settlement, a shipment of slaves arrived, transported from Africa …)
, never taking her eyes from the book, her voice a mechanical mumble, the bland-faced spinster completely oblivious of the great stream just outside the window which had borne this craft to its cosmic destination.
Wasn’t it right out there?
I called out suddenly, interrupting her, startling my classmates.
Wasn’t what?
she replied, startled too.
The Dutch ship that brought the slaves.
For an instant I’d seen it, the galleon, its cumbersome hull high in the stern, dingy, sails set, wallowing westward through the river’s undulant swells.
Why yes
, she said firmly,
I suppose so. I suppose it was out there.
She returned to her page, obviously annoyed. The kids whispered together, eyeing me suspiciously. I felt a sudden flush of embarrassment, wondering at the apparition on the river, and at the reckless, almost angry compulsion that had caused me to try to make my dull-witted teacher
come alive to the spirit of the past spooking this ancient shoreline.

I couldn’t explain why, but Negroes and their teeming presence in my boyhood—the whole conundrum of color and slavery’s cruel bequest—had begun to absorb me, battering on my imagination and forcing me to express the mighty grip that black people had on my heart and mind, moving me to scratch it all down in the apprentice stories I sweated over day after summer day at the picnic table by the James. I had just embarked on a trip to Faulknerland—
Light in August
was my first exposure to his stormy rhetoric, and I was smitten. My God! I saw immediately how riven by the torment of race this writer must have been, from the very dawn of his life. He intimidated me with his talent, to the point of making me wince as I marveled at his incantatory rhythms; I knew I could never approximate his gifts, or the surging energy, but the great tragic themes he tackled—of race and mingled blood and the guilt imprinted on the souls of white southerners—were ones that challenged me, too.

I’d work for three or four hours on my raw little tales—about Lawrence, my favorite black barber, or the wisdom of Florence; or once, in an essay in horror far beyond my depth, about a lynching in North Carolina my father had witnessed as a boy—and then by early afternoon it would be time to call it quits. Time to collect my yellow sheets and my two dozen pencils worn down to the wood, to clean up the cigarette butts I’d left in a litter around the picnic table (compulsive tidiness—“policing the area”—fostered by the Marine Corps), to recap the thermos of coffee I always brought along to help jog up my brain cells—all this before
driving downtown to the Palace Café for a bite to eat and the pleasure that was, quite simply, my greediest anticipation.

I loved the Palace Café. And I loved getting drunk there. Its therapy lay in the power of the four or five beers that I guzzled to ease, almost after the first half bottle, the racking misery of my time in the Pacific. That time was never entirely absent from my thoughts, creating a constant gripe in my psyche like a throbbing gut; the effect of a few swallows of the good suds was as analgesic as a shot of morphine. It was what the rustic folk of the Tidewater called a “high lonesome,” this daily bender of mine. It was a gentle, civilized bender, solitary, introspective, mildly (not maniacally) euphoric, and always cut short before the onset of confusion or incoherence. I prided myself on a certain drinker’s discipline.

The Palace Café was a barnlike tavern on the town’s main drag; the blue-collar shipyard workers who were its chief clientele, and who dined on its pork-chops-and-potatoes menu, had usually cleared out by the time I arrived, a little after two in the afternoon. I seated myself under an outsized electric fan that stirred the heavy air, odorous with pork. I had the place more or less to myself then, and I would dreamily relax in the same greasy booth, listening to the jukebox and its grieving and lovelorn country troubadours—Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells—who could pluck at my heartstrings with fingers different from those of Mozart but, in their own way, almost as deft and seductive. They, like the cold astringent beer, caused the Pacific and its troubles to gently recede, even as ornate daydreams of the future filled their place. It was like a rage: I
knew
I must become a writer! So I’d sit there and reread my sketches,
buoyed toward a vision of myself ten years hence, or twenty when my work had flowered, then fully ripened, and the fumbling novice had been crowned with the laurel branch of Art. While adrift in these largely deranged fantasies I made a concession to the needs of nutrition by lunching on potato chips and pickled pigs’ feet, the latter a specialty of the house.

And then there was my favorite waitress, Darlynne Fulcher. Part of the appeal of going to the Palace Café was Darlynne and her flirty lewdness, a lewdness neutralized by her (to me) advanced age—she was well past forty—and by her truly daunting looks: big porous beak, spectacles, top-heavy hairdo, the works. A nice voluptuous body offset this enough to make plausible her raunchy style, though at the outset I must have sat in my booth five or six days running, taking scarcely any notice of her, before I heard her murmur, as she plopped down a beer: “You look like you need some pussy.” It was not at all a come-on; in fact, I realized it was a way to break the ice, to good-naturedly test the bounds of my dogged solitariness. Actually I welcomed the intrusion, since I enjoyed Darlynne’s simple-hearted fooling around about sex (“I bet you got a good-sized dick on you, guys with prominent noses are well-hung”), while at the same time she understood my basic need to be let alone, immersed in my remedial bath of Budweiser. In the moments when we did talk, during the late afternoon hours as she’d stand there, hands on one hip, patiently shooing away the flies, I discovered that some intimate communion we’d established made it possible for me to say a few words about the war. What I had to say wasn’t much though it was more than I’d spoken to anyone before, certainly more than I’d said to my father or Isabel.

“From the first time I seen you sitting here I knew something was eating at you. It’s the war, ain’t it? Did something happen to you?”

The question required some rumination. “Well, yes and no, Darlynne.”

“I don’t mean to pry, you know. My cousin Leroy was shot up real bad over in Europe. He doesn’t like to talk about it either.”

“No, I wasn’t shot. I never got shot at. It was something else I’d had a problem with.” I halted. “But I’d better not talk about it.” After another pause I said: “It was in my head—my mind. It was worse than being shot at.”

She plainly understood my wanting to drop the subject. “How come a nice-looking boy like you don’t ever have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. Most of the girls I used to know—the college girls—are away for the summer. Gone to places like Nags Head or Virginia Beach. Or they have summer jobs in Washington or New York. Anyway, they’re gone.”

“College girls won’t give you a good time. You need a real horny country girl. My baby stepsister’s just broke up with her husband, this jerk. She’s hot. She really needs a good time. I’m gonna fix you up with Linda.”

It hardly mattered that Linda never materialized, content as I was to sit with my amber bottles and my fantasies, my pumped-up auguries of future glory, and with the thrill of the woeful rapture that always seized me when Ernest Tubb’s steel guitar struck the first chords of “Try Me One More Time.”

Outside I could see the late-afternoon shoppers hurrying homeward. Gathering up my manuscripts I’d give Darlynne
a hug, swat her on her big rump, and head homeward myself, steering the Pontiac with focused care, untroubled, optimistic from head to foot, deliciously tranquilized. I’d be going back to college soon, and this dismal battleground would be forever behind me.

ELOBEY, ANNOBÓN,
AND CORISCO

Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.
These form a group of small islands off the west coast of Africa, in the Gulf of Guinea, and I pondered them over and over again when we returned to Saipan, where I would lie in my tent and think with intense longing of the recent past—that is to say, my early years.

During the philatelic period of my late childhood only a few years before, a phase that followed my obsession with raising pigeons, I had somehow come to own a moderately rare stamp from “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.” By moderately rare I mean that the Scott catalog priced the one I owned, a used specimen, at $2.75, which in those Depression days was a large enough sum to make a small boy’s stomach squirm pleasurably, totally apart from the aesthetic pleasure of the stamp itself. A note in my album revealed that “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco” was under the governance of Spain, more specifically Spanish Guinea. The
stamp portrayed a “vignette,” as Scott always described the world’s scenic views, of a mountain peak and palm trees and fishing boats in a tropical harbor; the general coloration was green and blue (or, according to Scott with its painterly precision, viridian and aquamarine), and there was a title beneath:
Los Pescadores.
Keen-eyed, I had no trouble picking out the fishermen themselves, who were Negroes and wore white turbans and were busy at work tending their nets against a backdrop of aquamarine harbor and viridian mountains, behind which the sun appeared to be setting. There were other stamps in my collection that I greatly admired—a huge Greek airmail in gorgeous pastel facets, rather like stained glass; a gaudy number from Guatemala featuring a quetzal bird with streaming tail feathers; a glossy octagonal from Hejaz festooned with Arabic script; the Nyasaland triangle, shaped to accommodate spindly-legged giraffes—but none so arrested my imagination or so whetted my longing for faraway places as the one from that archipelago whose name itself was an incantation:
Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.

Back on Saipan I found myself an unwilling visitor to one of those faraway places of my stamp collection and yearned for nothing better than to be stretched out on the floor of the living room, merely dreaming of one of those places rather than being actually in one. In the tent, half-drowsing in the wicked heat, I would convert my identity into that of a small boy again, re-creating in memory ever younger incarnations of myself. In the stamp collection sequence, for example, it would be Sunday afternoon: sprawled on the crimson rug I would lick little cellophane hinges while my mother, her steel-braced leg propped on a stool beneath
an afghan, read the sepia-tinted rotogravure section of the
New York Times
, and my father, seated at the antique walnut secretary, penned one of his innumerable letters regarding the Whitehurst family genealogy. Warm, too warm (for in the winter my mother was always cold), the room contained the lingering smell of the roast chicken we had eaten for Sunday dinner, and the whole sunny space, cocoon-like, was wrapped in layers and layers of sound: the New York Philharmonic from the table-top Zenith radio. Forest horns and kettledrums. Swollen ecstasy. Johannes Brahms. Sunday’s murmurous purple melancholy.

Another scene from a younger time: my father alongside me as we lay at the edge of the bank above the muddy James. He was teaching me to shoot. The .22 bullets were greasy to the fingertips, the odor of burnt powder both sweet and pungent as the casings flew from the chamber. Squ
eeze
slowly, he would murmur, and my heart would skip a beat when I saw the green whiskey bottle turn to flying shards in the sand. Younger, much younger, I felt the ceramic bowl chill against my legs while he taught me accuracy in peeing.
Stand close, son
were his words;
hit the hole.
I couldn’t locate any memories of my father earlier than this, nor of the protectiveness and safety he embodied for his son lost in the Pacific distances. Anything earlier than this would have meant oblivion, prememory, only my father’s seed and my mother’s womb. And that womb, likewise protective and safe, was from time to time another place I longed for in the persistent ache of my dread.

For in truth the embryonic fear I’d felt on the ship had swollen hugely. I was scared nearly to death. While previously Okinawa had been an exciting place to dream about,
an island where I would exploit my potential for bravery, now the idea of going back there nearly sickened me. Thus I found myself in a conflict I had never anticipated: afraid of going into battle, yet even more afraid of betraying my fear, which would be an ugly prelude to the most harrowing fear of all—that when forced to the test in combat I would demonstrate my absolute terror, fall apart, and fail my fellow marines. These intricately intertwined fears began to torment me without letup. And though I continued my jaunty masquerade, more often than not dread won out. And when that happened I would seek my tent, if I had the chance, and lie on my cot gazing upward at the stitch and weave of the canvas, and try to exorcise the dread, whispering:
Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.